SUN
SUN 0 Lord, it was all night Consuming me skin crawling tighter than any Skin of my teeth. Bleary with ointments, dazzling Through the dark house man red as iron glowing Blazing up anew with each bad Breath from the bellowing curtains 1 had held the sun longer Than it could stay and in the dark it turned My face on, infra-red: there were cracks circling My eyes where I had squinted Up from stone-blind sand, and seen Eternal fire coronas huge Vertical banners of flame Leap scrollingly from the sun and tatter To nothing in blue-veined space On the smoked-crimson glass of my lids. When the sun fell, I slit my eyeskins In the dazed ruddy muddle of twilight And in the mirror saw whiteness Run from my eyes like tears going upward And sideways slanting as well as falling, All in straight lines like rays Shining and behind me, careful not To touch without giving me a chance To brace myself a smeared Suffering woman came merging her flame-shaken Body halo with mine her nose still clownish With oxides: walked to me sweating Blood, and turned around. I peeled off Her bathing suit like her skin her colors 254 Wincing she silently biting Her tongue off her back crisscrossed with stripes Where winter had caught her and whipped her. We stumbled together, and in the double heat The last of my blond hair blazed up, Burned off me forever as we dived For the cool of the bed In agony even at holding hands the blisters On our shoulders shifting crackling Releasing boiling water on the sheets. O Lord Who can turn out the sun, turn out that neighbor's One bulb on his badminton court For we are dying Of light searing each other not able To stop to get away she screaming O Lord Apollo or Water, Water as the moonlight drove Us down on the tangled grid Where in the end we lay Suffering equally in the sun Backlashed from the moon's brutal stone And meeting itself where we had stored it up All afternoon in pain in the gentlest touch As we lay, O Lord, In Hell, in love. Falling 255 ...
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